Last night I was working on integrating oAuth consumers into Noisophile. This is the first time I had done something like this so I was reading all of the material I could to get the best idea for what I was about to do. I came across a blog post about oAuth and one particular way of managing the information passed back from Twitter and the like.
This person will remain unidentified as I don’t want gobs of people spamming his site, nor do I want to give his poor judgement any extra exposure. That said, the basis of the post was, it is preferable to make users authenticate with Twitter every time they logged into the system as opposed to storing the keys and remembering who the users of the site are.
The take-away message was, paraphrased, “it’s a simple back and forth between your site and Twitter each time they log in. It won’t bother the user and it is preferable to storing all of those authentication keys.” Continue Reading »
My last post was about finding a healthy balance between client- and server-side technology. My friend sent me a link to an article about SEO and Google’s “reasonable surfer” patent. Though the information regarding Google’s methods for identifying and appropriately assessing useful links on a site was interesting, I am quite concerned about what the SEO crowd was encouraging because of this new revelation.
It is important to consider search engines during the site building process, however I feel the SEO guys often get carried away. In this article it is suggested that you de-emphasize navigation and forget footers along with lots of other questionable advice.
These two suggestions alone are enough for me to consider this article, at best, a crackpot spouting extremist ideas. SEO experts often seem to forget a very important element on the web: the user. Continue Reading »
Since I am an engineer first and a designer second in my job, more often than not the designs you see came from someone else’s comp. Being that I am a designer second, it means that I know just enough about design to be dangerous but not enough to be really effective over the long run.
When I say I am a designer second I mean I am, in fact, a design school dropout. I went, I learned just enough to “get it” and then I ended up dropping out. I did go back to school and I got a math degree, but that is a different story for a different day.
If there is anything I learned from design school, it was that everything in design is done for a reason. Mind you, this is when design is at its best. Every designer that is working to solve a problem and communicate with the viewer has incorporated elements and done things so a specific message comes through. Continue Reading »
When you start working on a website or application, what is your goal? In the current state of the web, there are many ways you can carry your user but, in the end, you must choose web inclusive or web exclusive. Sites with rich APIs which interact with the world around them are web inclusive. Sites which focus internally, drawing little content from the outside web and, ultimately, giving nothing back are web exclusive.
The web is moving away from exclusivity. When the web started, documents were shared, whole, and people had to visit a particular site to view their content. It rarely came to you, typically requiring you went to it. This was the face of the web in the 1990′s. Autonomous operating sites maintained individually for the sake of the content maintained within. Continue Reading »
This morning I read a post about wireframes and when they are appropriate. Though I agree, audience is important, it is equally important to hand the correct items to the audience at the right times. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t create wireframes.
There is an inherent problem with simply not creating wireframes before the design process begins. If the designer is handed a stack of content and a few images that represent what the stakeholders would like to see incorporated, the project can land, very quickly, in a swamp.
The designer won’t have user data to work with. The site may lack important flow and the information presented may become lost in a design which is appealing and hard to use. Wireframes do more than simply offer a low-fidelity idea of what the design is going to look like in the end. Continue Reading »
I just read a short, relatively old blog post by David Naylor regarding why he believes XML sitemaps are bad. People involved with SEO probably know and recognize the name. I know I did. I have to disagree with his premise, but agree with his argument.
I say XML sitemaps are good!
The real issue with XML sitemaps does not lay in the technology but the use. If a site is well designed, well developed and has a strong information architecture, it should spider well and indexing should occur. Moreover, if the HTML/XHTML supporting the information on the site is well formed, the site should get decent rankings. This is where I agree with David. Continue Reading »
Today, at the time of this writing, Google posted a blog stating they were dropping support for old browsers. They stated:
The web has evolved in the last ten years, from simple text pages to rich, interactive applications including video and voice. Unfortunately, very old browsers cannot run many of these new features effectively.
I made a case to move in the same direction at my company less than a month ago. I reviewed the visitor statistics and discovered less than 10% of all visitors to our sites use Internet Explorer. Months ago, Digg posted a blog asking whether they should block Internet Explorer 6 from viewing the site. Their statistics represented similar numbers to our own. Continue Reading »
People are creative. It’s a fact of the state of humanity. People want to make things. It’s built into the human condition. But there is a difference between haphazard creation and focused, goal-oriented development.
Andy Rutledge states that creativity is not design. I agree with him. Creativity alone does not solve problems. Creativity, when allowed free reign, is as much a destructive force in business projects as it could be a productive partner.
Creativity can be a great driver for new ideas, but when creative focus remains the primary focus, the end product is bound to suffer. Web sites can prove a noteworthy breeding ground for creative direction overriding good problem solving. Continue Reading »
Every time I wander the web I seem to find it more complicated than the last time I left it. Considering this happens on a daily basis, the complexity appears to be growing monotonically. It has been shown again and again that the attention span of people on the web is extremely short. A good example of this is a post on Reputation Defender about the click-through rate on their search results.
I was discussing these two aspects of the web with the graphic designer at my work and we seemed to agree that all evidence points to the growing trends of complexity and short attention spans. Then we had something of a revelation. Perhaps there is a correlation. Is it possible that the ever increasing complexity of the web and the numerous sites which live there are encouraging the limited attention of users? Perhaps it’s the other way around and short attention spans affect choice to add extra elements to an already architecture-overburdened site. Continue Reading »
It’s been a while since I have posted. I know. For those of you that are checking out this blog for the first time, welcome. For those of you who have read my posts before, welcome back. We’re not here to talk about the regularity (or lack thereof) that I post with. What we are here to talk about is supporting or not supporting browsers. So first, what inspired me to write this? Well… this:
We Don’t Support IE
So, this brings a question to mind — which browsers should we choose not to support and for what reasons?
This is an easy question to answer. You support all of them. Yep, you heard me right. You support everything. You are mindful of browser incompatibilities, inequities, disabled users, mobile users and users you had never even thought of before. You are aware of the fact that browsers come in multiple versions and you make your sites backwards compatible. Long and short, do not tell your users what to do. Continue Reading »